The disaster film Twister (watch it HERE) was a massive success for Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, and Amblin Entertainment when it was released during the summer movie season in 1996. Made on a budget of $90 million, it earned almost $500 million at the global box office and ranked as the tenth highest-grossing film of all time. Quickly cashing in with a sequel would have made a lot of sense. But while there were rumors – including a memorable one that said the sequel would involve a tornado hitting a major city – a follow-up never made it into production. Until now. Universal and Amblin are reviving the Twister IP with a film called Twisters, which is set to receive a theatrical release on July 19, 2024. Twenty-eight years later, will it be able to replicate or surpass the success of its predecessor? We’ll have to wait and see. But for know, we’re going to dig into Twisters: Everything We Know About the Sequel.
DIRECTOR(S)
We have Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski to thank for the existence of Twisters. He developed the concept with The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith before taking the pitch to Twister executive producers Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall. That got the project rolling – and announced in the trades as a reboot. But then Kosinski dropped out of the project to direct the Brad Pitt F1 racing movie Apex instead. While Smith worked on the script, other directors like Dan Trachtenberg, Travis Knight, and the duo of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi were considered. Twister director Jan de Bont didn’t make the list – probably because he hasn’t directed a movie in over twenty years. After making the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider sequel The Cradle of Life, he had enough. So the job went to Lee Isaac Chung, who had earned a Best Director Oscar nomination for his semi-autobiographical drama Minari and also helmed an episode of The Mandalorian. Once Chung was signed on, he did his own script revisions.
STARS
Daisy Edgar-Jones of Where the Crawdads Sing stars Twisters as a former storm chaser who works a desk job after surviving a disastrous tornado encounter. As the story plays out, she will be forced back out onto the field. That’s all we know about her character – and all we know about the plot so far. Edgar-Jones is joined in the cast by Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Daryl McCormack, Kiernan Shipka, Maura Tierney, Harry Hadden-Paton, Sasha Lane, Nik Dodani, Tunde Adebimpe, Katy O’Brian, Brandon Perea, and the new Superman, David Corenswet. Unfortunately, we don’t know anything about the characters any of the actors other than Edgar-Jones are playing.
NO RETURNING CHARACTERS
You might have noticed that the cast list doesn’t include any actors from the first film. Of course, we’ve lost some of them since ’96, including Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman, but there are still several who could have been brought back for an appearance. Despite this, Twisters apparently doesn’t feature any returning characters. Although it was once rumored that Edgar-Jones would be playing the daughter of Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt’s Twister characters, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Twisters has been described as a completely standalone story.
A few years ago, Hunt was developing a sequel with Blindspotting writers Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal that she wanted to direct herself. Hunt said she envisioned the film centering on a diverse group of storm chasers from a Historically Black College and University. They would be part of the rocket science club, and would be shooting rockets into the tornado for reasons she didn’t reveal. Hunt intended to reprise the role of Doctor Jo Harding and would have played the character as elder, tired, and haggard. But she wouldn’t have been around for long, because Jo was going to get caught in a tornado and killed in the opening sequence. So maybe it’s for the best that she’s not in the movie at all. Hunt’s idea didn’t get anywhere because she had terrible timing: she pitched her Twister sequel to Universal in June of 2020. The exact same month they announced they were working with Kosinski on a reboot.
CLIMATE CHANGE
While writer Mark L. Smith hasn’t revealed any plot details, he did tell Collider that Twisters will deal with climate change. He was quoted as saying, “I talked to so many storm experts, tornado experts, storm chasers, and rode around with some. Even the tornado season itself, because of climate change, what used to be tornado alley going through a certain stretch now extends further east. It’s moving across, the dates are wider, the numbers are higher, and the storms themselves are more violent. So we use elements of that to shine a light on it, the causes and effects of climate change.“
UNIVERSAL APPEAL
Cast member Glen Powell told Vogue (with thanks to Deadline for sharing the text) that Twisters is “definitely not a reboot. We’re not trying to recreate the story from the first one. It’s a completely original story. There are no characters from the original movie back, so it’s not really a continuation. It’s just its own standalone story in the modern-day. I don’t think anyone has brought up (Twister) in forever, but talking to people, they’re like, ‘That was one of my favorite movies growing up. That movie terrified me.’“ So whatever the story may be and whoever the characters are, Powell is confident that Twisters is going to have universal appeal. In fact, that’s the whole reason he decided to work on the film. He’s following advice he received from his Top Gun: Maverick co-star Tom Cruise, who told him, “If you want to make movies of a certain size and scope and scale, you have to figure out what can connect with everyone around the world in every territory.” That led him to Twisters because “humans versus weather is a very universal idea—how powerless we really are in the face of these cataclysmic forces.“
TRAILER
The first trailer for Twisters was unveiled during the Super Bowl, giving the first look at what the film has in store for us. It looks like Chung has managed to replicate the tone and style of the original movie quite well, while obviously packing his movie with plenty of destructive tornado sequences. Powell is revealed to be playing a storm chaser named Tyler Owens, who calls himself the Tornado Wrangler, while Edgar-Jones’ character (possibly named Kate Cooper) is hoping to get the chance to “destroy a tornado”. There may not be any returning characters from Twister, but something that has made its way over to this movie is the “Dorothy” scientific instrument, basically a barrel that releases sensors into tornados. There were four numbered Dorothy instruments in Twister, and the Twisters trailer shows a Dorothy V in action, so it appears this story does carry on from the ’96 film in some way.
And that’s everything we know about Twisters at this time. Are you a fan of Twister, and are you looking forward to watching this return to the concept? Let us know by leaving a comment below.